


give your heart and soul to me

by gealbhan



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Baking, Critical Role Femslash Week, Domestic, Established Relationship, F/F, Fluff, Multi, Polyamory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-21
Updated: 2019-01-21
Packaged: 2019-10-13 10:46:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17486696
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gealbhan/pseuds/gealbhan
Summary: “We’re making tiramisu for Molly’s birthday,” says Jester cheerfully.“Also cupcakes, later,” adds Yasha.“Beau, do you want to help out? I know this isn’t really your thing, so—”Maybe it isn’t, Beau thinks, but Jester’s wide, expectant eyes certainly are. She nudges Jester’s side. “Yeah, sure. I’ve got nothing better to do, right?”





	give your heart and soul to me

**Author's Note:**

> written for day 6 of [critical role femslash week](https://critrolefemslash.tumblr.com/post/180178925470/critical-role-femslash-week-will-be-held-wednesday): baking & polyamory!
> 
> title is from "la vie en rose" by louis armstrong, or more specifically [daniela andrade's cover](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Ba_WoSZXvw). enjoy!

Beau comes back to a silent house, or at least a silent foyer. Given the usual noise level of her girlfriends (well, one more so than the other), it’s a little chilling, and the only thing keeping her from immediately assuming they’ve been robbed is the text she got from Jester ten minutes ago. No one can fake that amount of emojis.

She kicks off her shoes and cranes her neck. There’s a faint sound coming from further inside—music?

“Jes? Yasha?” she yells, and it echoes around the room.

A beat of silence, then Jester yells back, “We’re in the kitchen!”

Well, far from unusual. Beau leaves her bag and keys in the entryway, then heads through the great room and ducks her head into the kitchen. She blinks twice before she processes the scene before her—Jester and Yasha are both in here, indeed, along with what seems to be the entire contents of their refrigerator, pantry, and cabinets spread out across the counters.

“Uh. Hey,” she says, barely keeping herself from turning it into a question.

Jester, who is perched on the island and humming along to upbeat pop playing on the speaker beside her, grins, tail swinging with her legs. “Hey, Beau! Welcome home!”

“How was your day?” says Yasha, not looking up from whatever she’s stirring in a double boiler. On closer inspection, it seems to be a mixing bowl stacked on top of a pot. Jester couldn’t find the actual double boiler, then.

“Pretty good, I guess.” Beau glances around again, rubs her eyes, and then decides to step inside the room itself. She feels immediately like she’s stepped into another dimension—but, not wanting to interrupt Yasha’s intense stirring, she crosses the room to kiss Jester’s cheek and raises an eyebrow. “So, babe, what’s happening here?”

“We’re making tiramisu for Molly’s birthday,” says Jester cheerfully.

“Also cupcakes, later,” adds Yasha.

“Right. Molly’s birthday. I totally remembered that,” lies Beau. Jester gives her a _you’re so full of it_ sort of look but doesn’t challenge her on it, so Beau kisses her again. “How long have you been at it with the tiramisu?”

Jester waves her hand. “Oh, just a few minutes. The timer for Yasha to stop stirring should go off in, mm, about—”

Across the room, the kitten-shaped timer rings. Jester gasps.

“Now, I guess! Yasha, you can turn the stove off now.” Yasha does so. Jester turns back to Beau. “Beau, do you want to help out? I know this isn’t really your thing, so—”

Maybe it isn’t, Beau thinks, but Jester’s wide, expectant eyes certainly are. She nudges Jester’s side. “Yeah, sure. I’ve got nothing better to do, right?”

“Yay! Thank you!” Jester hops down with a _thump_ and throws her arms around Beau’s neck. Despite how long they’ve been together, Beau still almost yelps at the sudden touch, and her hands have only made it to awkwardly hover by Jester’s hips by the time Jester pulls back. Jester’s beam is as contagious as ever. “Would you mind beating the egg yolks, then?”

Beau gives her a thumbs up, then walks over to Yasha. She gets up on her tiptoes to kiss her cheek in greeting, gets a hum and tiny smile in response, and leans back to take the bowl from her.

“So I just, uh—” Beau eyes the mess on the counter. Under Yasha’s watchful and silent eye and Jester’s louder one (if only for the humming), she picks out what is probably a whisk up from the various instruments and mimes moving it in a circle in the air above the bowl, which contains sugar and egg yolks. “Yeah?”

“Yep,” says Jester, still grinning.

“You really haven’t done anything like this before?” says Yasha.

Beau’s brows pinch together. “I think my mom tried to get me to bake when I was a kid, but I’ve blocked all those memories,” she says, and gets a sympathetic hip bump. She shrugs it off and begins beating the eggs. It’s calming, she finds with surprise, or at least it is until she registers Yasha’s vaguely judgmental tone. “And—hey, it’s not like you do a ton of baking either, Yash!”

Yasha lifts her hands in self-defense. Across the room, Jester giggles.

“Yasha _does_ help me out when I make cookies,” she says, and Beau shoots her an offended look. “I’m just stating the facts, Beau.”

“You make her do this every damn time?” Already, Beau’s arm is getting tired.

Jester grins, flashing her fangs. “If she’s wearing a tank top, yes. That way I can watch her arm muscles while she’s doing it.”

Beau glances at Yasha, whose cheeks have gone a bright pink—she is, in fact, wearing a tank top today, a black one that matches the roots of her hair. Beau drops her whisk and hands her the bowl. “Your turn.”

Yasha looks into the bowl. “They, um—they’ve already been beaten enough. Good job, by the way,” she adds, and Beau preens.

“You’ll just have to bake with us more, then,” says Jester, winking.

Beau considers that. “Sounds doable.”

Jester’s grin widens, and she bounces over to take the bowl and admire Beau’s handiwork. “Ooh, I second what Yasha said—great job,” she coos, genuine enough that Beau preens again. Yasha chuckles. “I already know how good you are with your hands, though. Anyway—” Beau smirks despite her sudden flush “—Yasha, would you mind getting a bowl from the cupboard over there? And Beau, could you get the mascarpone out of the fridge, pretty please?”

Yasha shrugs and heads over to the cupboard in question. Beau is finding one major problem with her directions.

“Hey, Jes?”

“Yes?”

“I have absolutely no fuckin’ clue what mascarpone is.”

“It’s a—huh,” says Jester, frown twisting her face. “You know what, I don’t actually know what it is either, except that it’s Italian and fancy. Okay, I’ll get it.” She passes the bowl and whisk back to Beau and skips over to the fridge.

Yasha returns with another bowl before Jester and her mascarpone, whatever that is. She sets it down on the counter and gives Beau a bemused look. “You’re in charge of that, it looks like.”

“This bowl is my third girlfriend,” deadpans Beau, patting its side, and Yasha laughs.

“Here’s the mascarpone,” singsongs Jester. In addition to a tin of the stuff, she’s holding a carton of whipping cream.

“I’m assuming that’s for the recipe and not to pour directly into your mouth like usual,” says Beau.

“I have never done that in my entire life,” says Jester, which is one of the most blatant lies Beau has ever heard from her. She turns her gape on Yasha, who only shrugs. “But yes, it’s for the recipe. Beau, you can put one and three-quarters cups into the other bowl,” she adds, gesturing toward the abandoned measuring cups. “I’ll take the one you’re holding back.”

“Cool.” Beau swaps it for Jester’s whipping cream, then heads over to grab a measuring cup. Yasha, she notices, has taken to leaning against the kitchen island.

She eyeballs the side measurements more so than she deliberately measures the amount she pours in, but she’s seen Jester do it from a distance dozens of time, so she figures it’s all right. She tips the cup into the bowl Yasha had retrieved.

“All done,” she calls.

Jester nods in approval, still whisking the mascarpone into the bowl she’d taken from Beau. “You can just leave that there. For now—” She stops whisking and hands the bowl over to Yasha. “Can you put this in the fridge? I need to set the timer for it.”

Yasha nods. Beau watches Jester twirl back over to the timer.

“That has to be in the fridge for about fifteen minutes,” she says, setting it, “so you both know what that means, right?” Beau and Yasha exchange a bewildered look. Jester frowns. “Fifteen-minute dance party, obviously!”

Yasha coughs and blanches. Beau stammers out a bevy of excuses that don’t even make sense in her head, but she doubts it’ll matter.

“ _Ugh_ , you two are no fun.” Jester flounces back over to the speaker, which Beau now notices is hooked to her phone. She does some fiddling around, and after a moment of Beau and Yasha continuing to glance nervously at each other, a slower, softer tune begins playing. “Come on, neither of you will dance with me?”

She holds out her hand, swaying back and forth and looking between Beau and Yasha with those wide eyes again. Beau opens and then closes her mouth—she’s pretty sure if Jester asked her to murder somebody while giving her that look, she’d agree in a heartbeat. She glances at Yasha, who has much the same expression on her face. She takes Yasha’s hand and walks her over to Jester.

Jester’s face lights up. “I thought so,” she says, a little smug.

The mechanics of slow dancing with three people are extremely complicated, as far as Beau can parse, but so are most other things with three people. And, like most other things with three people, they work it out somehow.

Beau takes Jester’s hand in her free one, and Yasha takes Jester’s other hand, and together, they sway like teenagers at a school dance, stiff and inhibited by their awkward positioning. Beau doesn’t recognize the song playing, but she hums along to it anyway. Before long, Yasha joins her. Jester squeezes both their hands tighter. For these fifteen minutes, which to Beau are removed from the normal, steady convention of the flow of time, they just exist together.

At one point, Jester coaxes Beau and Yasha into twirling her at the same time—it’s clumsy and badly timed, and Jester stumbles and almost falls but Yasha catches her and stands her back up, and then they all look at each other and burst out laughing. The rest of their displaced fifteen minutes are spent trying (this being the operative word) to recover.

Then the timer goes off, and this odd time bubble is snapped, and Jester lets go of both Beau and Yasha’s hands to rush to the fridge. Yasha lowers her and Beau’s still-intertwined hands and runs her thumb across the base of Beau’s thumb. A moment later, Jester returns with the bowl and whisk.

“Yasha, you have to mix the whipping cream in, then whip it for, like, ten minutes so it gets all soft and whipped,” she says in a single breath.

Yasha blinks. “Why do I _have_ to?”

“Because Beau and I want to watch your arms,” says Jester with a grin. “Don’t we, Beau?”

Beau chokes, at least in part because Jester elbows her (completely unnecessarily, since she’s been on board since Jester made the comment about it in the first place) in the ribs. “Jesus Christ, Jes—I mean, yeah, for sure. Mm-hmm.” She coughs, rubbing her side.

Jester flushes. “Sorry. I got excited. I’ll kiss it better later,” she adds with a wink.

Yasha raises her eyebrows. Beau can tell she’s amused from the minor quirk of her lips, but for all other intents and purposes, the rest of her face is unimpressed. “Okay. I really have to mix it for ten minutes?”

“Okay, maybe more like five,” admits Jester. “However long it takes for peaks to form.”

“I could have done ten,” says Yasha, shrugging. “I was just checking.” As she reaches over to pick up the bowl of whipping cream, she glances back over at Beau and Jester, who are standing in the exact same positions. Her cheeks fill with color. “You’re really going to watch me do this?”

“Yes,” say Beau and Jester in unison, and they do. Over the six minutes it takes for Yasha to whip the cream and then fold it into the mixture, they exchange idle chitchat but never take their eyes off her. Yasha doesn’t seem to mind.

Jester claps when Yasha is done. “Okay, now get some espresso and warm water—I’ll get the espresso, actually,” she adds when Yasha gives the machine a wary look. “Beau, could you grab some Kahlua, please?”

“Do we even _have_ Kahlua?” says Beau, even as she trudges over to the fridge. She wrenches it open and scans the shelves. “Holy shit, we need to rearrange this. Make that our next weekend project, please.”

“Writing it on the calendar now,” says Yasha.

“Thanks, you’re the best. Uh, so we’ve got milk, my trashy beer, _Yasha’s_ trashy but slightly more expensive beer, _Jester’s_ much more expensive milk—oh!” She moves one of her six-packs aside to reveal, in the very back of the refrigerator—“Here’s some Kahlua! …Wait, fuck, how old is this?”

“Oh, you found some?”

Beau whirls around to find Yasha closer than she had been several seconds ago, which gives her a momentary heart attack—it’s not every day Beau turns around to find a tall, muscular woman right behind her, even if that woman is her girlfriend. Once her heartbeat slows to a normal rate, Beau offers her the bottle. Yasha takes it with a mildly apologetic head tilt.

“It wasn’t there when we cleaned the fridge three months ago,” she says after a moment of inspecting it. “So it is probably still good.”

“Good to know,” says Beau, and then she takes it back to hand to Jester.

“Okay, we need to add two cups of this to the espresso and water—”

“That seems like a lot.”

Jester gives her a flat look. “It’s for _Molly’s_ party, remember?”

Beau coughs. “Totally,” she says, and it isn’t even a lie. So maybe she’d forgotten for about thirty minutes who it was for, but now that she’s been reminded, it all comes back into focus. She will definitely not forget it again.

“He’ll probably ask why there wasn’t _more_ Kahlua,” comments Yasha, and Beau shrugs.

“All right, two cups it is. Jes, you wanna do the honors?”

“Sure.” Jester shakes the Kahlua and starts to head over to the counter, then stops halfway there to say, “While I’m doing that, Beau, can you find the package of ladyfingers? They should be, um, somewhere around here.” She doesn’t sound too sure about that, biting her lip, but she’s across the room and preoccupied before Beau can ask anything else.

Yasha hesitates. “Do you want me to help?”

“ _Please.”_

Eventually, by the time Jester has fixed up the mixture—which looks pretty good on its own, though Beau has kept her mouth from watering thus far—they’ve discovered the ladyfingers, and Yasha lugs the package over. Jester grins.

“I hope it wasn’t too hard to find,” she says despite the grin, and leans all the way up to kiss Yasha’s nose.

Beau pouts. “Hey, you didn’t kiss me when I got you the Kahlua.”

Jester huffs, exaggerated, and kisses Beau’s nose too. “Are you happy now?”

“Very,” says Beau, and Jester smiles and pats her face before she turns back to the counter, humming to herself all the way.

A small snicker from Yasha. Beau frowns, then sees a spot of blue lipstick on Yasha’s nose, which means— _ah_ , Beau regrets so much now. She licks her thumb and scrubs her nose with it. Yasha leans down to kiss her cheek; she doesn’t realize why until she notices Yasha’s black lipstick. For the first time in her entire life, Beau regrets not wearing lipstick. She settles for tugging on Yasha’s braid like a third grader.

“We’re going to do the first layer of these,” says Jester, oblivious to their silent bickering, pulling over a metal pan. “Dip ‘em in the mix for a few seconds, then put them in the pan. We should have—” She frowns, thinking for a second. “Two rows, I think? Anyway! Get to work!” she says with a little snicker and clap.

Beau finds herself immediately jolting forward. It’s a little startling. Yasha snorts but, Beau notices with a raised eyebrow, is doing the exact same thing.

For the next few minutes, they work together like a well-oiled machine, sometimes batting at each other’s hands when they’re both trying to dip a ladyfinger at the same time but cooperating for the most part. And then, after Jester spreads some of the mascarpone and whipped cream on top, they repeat the process.

“I get why you like baking so much now. This is fun as fuck,” says Beau offhandedly, and Jester just grins and keeps on pouring the cream mix.

Then she sprinkles some cocoa powder on top and gestures at the tiramisu before them. “It’s done!” she says, beaming, then considers. “Well, it’ll be done in a few hours, after we stick it in the fridge. What do you think?”

Beau has to admit, it looks pretty good. She’s not sure if she’ll be able to keep herself from eating it until Molly’s party, and it’s only in—she glances surreptitiously at the calendar—a couple days. There’s a feeling of pride in her chest, too. Not the usual kind she feels looking at her girlfriends’ cooking, the feeling of _hey, the two people I love most in the world created something tasty and pretty_ ; it’s different, and personal, and she thinks, looking at it, _I had a part in_ _making_ _this._ It’s just food, but the idea of creating something makes her heart a little softer.

She settles for kissing Jester’s cheek and finds that Yasha has leaned in to do the same thing on Jester’s other cheek. They grin at each other as they lean away.

“It’s perfect, Jes,” says Beau, patting her shoulder.

“Molly will love it,” says Yasha, eyes glinting. “Even if he’ll eat his serving in two bites, probably.”

Jester grins. “That’s just what I expected. I’ll go put this in the fridge, then,” she says, and then she picks up the pan and heads that way.

Wordless, Yasha takes Beau’s hand in her own. Beau squeezes her hand back and smiles.

The fridge door slams, then Jester sidles up to Beau and takes her other hand. “Do you want to help out with the cupcakes now?”

Beau glances around, at her girlfriends both smiling at her and holding her hands and lit by the gentle afternoon sun, and she feels herself relax, the soft feeling in her chest expanding to her entire body. She’s grinning back before she even realizes it.

“I’d love to.”

**Author's Note:**

> thanks for reading! if you have time to spare, i appreciate all kudos & comments <33
> 
>  
> 
> [recipe referenced](https://www.lifeloveandsugar.com/classic-tiramisu/)
> 
>  
> 
> this is my last entry for cr femslash week (i did start a jester/yasha fic for yesterday's prompt, i just... didn't finish it & probably won't for a while), but! i'm working on a couple multichapter aus, one of which i'm hoping to get up & running by valentine's day :3 so.... stay tuned
> 
> [tumblr](http://dndbutch.tumblr.com) / [twitter](http://twitter.com/birdmarrow)


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